The Daily’s front page article on April 9 is a pretty good description of what happened in the Government of the Student Body meeting last Wednesday. I was there representing Union Drive, and I was appalled at what went down.

The only thing the story leaves out was the attempt to strike down an already-passed weight room funding bill to free up funds for Iowa State Public Interest Research Group.

Some senators may tell you that this is not the reason the weight room bill was reconsidered, but in reality it was the driving force.

The fact is we have never done anything quite so ridiculous as to try to reconsider a bill that was already passed, just so we could fail it later in the night.

Supposedly, there was new information about the weight room that merited reconsideration, but the senator who provided this information had it during the first debate, but never spoke up.

The bill did pass again, albeit with half of its original funding. Hope someone passed the news on to the students who left the meeting after the bill passed the first time, satisfied that the weight room they use was being fully funded.

Equally despicable were the threats to Team PrISUm supporters.

ISPIRG and PrISUm have nothing to do with each other, and Team PrISUm’s funding has been put in peril for reasons having nothing to do with them.

Once again, supposedly there are valid reasons not to fund PrISUm, but it was clear to me that no one would have said a thing about PrISUm had ISPIRG been funded.

If certain people have a problem with PrISUm getting funding, that’s fine. But let it have absolutely nothing to do with ISPIRG.

The strong-arm tactics that some of the supporters of ISPIRG attempted to use to get their bill passed have absolutely no place in GSB, and I’m glad they didn’t work.

I think ISPIRG might be a beneficial organization, but to paraphrase its president’s quote in the Daily on Friday, that’s not the way the bill should be passed. If a bill doesn’t have majority support, it means that more than half of the senators think it’s a bad idea at that time, and it shouldn’t be passed.

This premise is the basis for how our senate works. Threats and coercion distort the process, and I can’t support that.

I want to stress that I have no hard feelings against any of the other senators, but the groups that we fund and the student body we represent deserve better. I hope we can start the next session on a better note.

Alan Johnson

GSB Senator

Union Drive